Day: October 7, 2007

The Wooden Boat Rescue Foundation

The Wooden Boat Rescue Foundation

It’s that time of year when I begin to dream of winter projects above and beyond making a living and keeping the wolf from the door. Today, with my skiff in the garage awaiting some surgery and TLC, I started the annual pining for a wooden boat project — a strip built kayak perhaps, another skiff, a Mackenzie Cuttyhunk bass boat ….

These are thoughts that get me in trouble with my wife. Then I found this website, one devoted to rescuing old hulks. I found my project, it awaits me on Long Island.

“The Wooden Boat Rescue Foundation is dedicated to placement, saving, locating, researching, wishing, learning and dreaming of wooden boats. All boats are free.Wooden Boats beyond a certain point of condition and/or age are becoming rare. After years without proper care, they are sawn up, burned, or buried. It is our hope that this site can centralize connections between current owners placing boats with people searching for boats.”


When I find the time I’ll attempt to post on the history of the Mackenzie bass boat, a Cape Cod design built in the 1960s. These are the boats “designed by a fish,” that fish being the striped bass.

The Coming OS Storm

Cheaper than therapy

Uncle Fester is a ThinkPad fan. Uncle Fester knows his ThinkPads cold. Now he posts a sad commentary, not about the hardware, but what it runs:

“The bigger problem is the laptop. I’m not sure I can leave Thinkpads. Nothing matches a Thinkpad. But eventually Vista will be the only supported game in town and I may not be given the choice. That’s a grim prospect but Vista is really that bad. Apple will probably never permit official virtualization of the Mac OS on other hardware and unless Microsoft makes some dramatic fixes, I really can’t face the prospect of using Vista full-time.”A decade hence, Vista will be viewed as the biggest dud out of Seattle since Bob. And the reason I finally switched back to Mac full time.”

Update: Jim Forbes comments on this post and Lipman’s and says Operating Systems don’t matter to him anymore. I respect Jim — he served time on the mastheads of both PCWeek and MacWeek — and crosses the two architectures as easily as anyone.
I’ll reserve comment on the OS issue but will make one admission. I have used Vista for 30 minutes since it shipped and that was on a desktop my mother bought at retail in Florida and uses for grandchildren-email. Think about that for a second. You know where I work, you know what I do; my exposure to the future of Wintel standard computing has been a grand total of half-an-hour.

I can make no judgment about Vista (I can lay some claim to being an ex-OS junkie due to my coverage of DOS and Windows while a tech reporter in the 80s and early 90s), but I do know this: if fans like Fester are looking at their hardware platform and voting with their feet based on the underlying OS …..

I need to go re-read Ferguson and Morris’ Computer Wars

Whereabout week of Oct. 8

Monday 10/8 – New York City

Tuesday-Wed 10/9-10 – Cotuit

Thursday-Fri 10/11-12 – Chicago, Forrester Consumer Forum (Thursday panel)

Sat-Sun 10/13-14 – Cotuit

Longrange:

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